Exercise machines are typically dedicated to a specific exercise. For example, in the well-known Nautilus (TM) family of exercise machines, one machine is dedicated to strengthening the neck muscles of the exerciser, another is dedicated to the triceps, and so on. On some of the machines, different exercises can be performed but none of the machines, standing alone, offers a wide variety of exercises.
Nautilus brand exercising machines are also very large and heavy and thus are not suitable for home use.
A number of inventors have developed relatively small and light-in-weight exercise machines, suitable for use in a home, that provide a large number of different exercises. These machines have met with limited success in the market place because they do not provide the practical exercises that most active people want. For example, a golfer desiring to increase the strength of the muscles that are used during a golf swing receives little help from a machine that helps increase the strength of the biceps and other muscles that play only a peripheral role during a golf swing.
Similarly, most exercise machines do not provide resistance to the muscles that a baseball or softball player uses when swinging a bat or throwing a ball. Moreover, few machines can help a kicker on a football team increase the range of kickoffs or field goals.
Perhaps more importantly, the art has heretofore failed to develop an exercise machine that provides all of the foregoing functions, and much more.
There is an unresolved need, then, for an exercise machine that builds specific muscles that are used in specific athletic activities such as golfing, baseball, canoeing, ball throwing, kicking, biking and the like, but the prior art, taken as a whole, neither teaches nor suggests how such a machine could be built.